If you were at the fair this week in Jackson, Mississippi and saw a bunch of Toshiba laptops that you thought looked awfully like blocks of wood and paper binders, well, you were right. Two men were arrested after trying to sell the blocks of wood—which were covered in bubble wrap and secured with duct tape and Toshiba labels—to an off-duty state trooper.

The local sheriff’s department offered much-needed context for the bust.

“By the time you take it and get it home, you find you’ve purchased a block of wood, you may as well throw it in the fireplace. It’s no good,” said Lt. Jeffery Scott, public information officer with the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department.

The men face charges of trademark infringement and illegally selling goods bearing counterfeit labels. They face up to $10,000 in fines and five years behind bars, which, if they can find a file and some duct tape, they can try selling to other inmates as DVD players.

1) Get a bunch of empty boxes and some junk to fill them with
2) Get one to show off
3) Con someone into buying one of for insanely low price
4) Give him box containing junk instead of the real thing
5) ?????
6) Profit!

Um, happens all the time at legitimate retailers (okay, so Walmart and Bogus Buy aren’t necessarily legitimate but work with what you got, right?) unfortunately. Customers buy what they think is an electronic item, open the box, and find out they got a brick instead of the new gadget they were expecting. Search Consumerist’s archives and you’ll see a bunch of stories relating to this.

Somehow I don’t think this is a very good idea, the customers know where the sellers are located so it could come back to them very easily. Unless the sellers were just there for a couple hours and left. Its also pretty easy to bust counterfeits like this if they are in plain public sight, which in this case they were.

I had an HP laptop once that was similar to a big block of wood. It constantly overheated and gave me the Blue Screen of Death so much it almost made me cry. Actually, I could have done more with a block of wood than I was ever able to do on that POS laptop.

“By the time you take it and get it home, you find you’ve purchased a block of wood, you may as well throw it in the fireplace. It’s no good,” said Lt. Jeffery Scott, public information officer with the Hinds County Sheriff’s Department.

Speak for himself. If I was dumb enough to get taken by these guys, you bet I’d be back at that fair and there’d be a good, old fashioned State Fair Ass-Kicking event drawing a crowd, with these two finding out what a block of wood is REALLY good for. During which these two not only gave me a refund, but had all the sales cash to anyone else confiscated so I could make sure it went back to the scammed buyers when they saw the story on the news.

It still amazes me that people fall for this old trick, but they do! I had a friend in Vegas who got taken by this scam. Only he bought a phone book disguised as a laptop, not a piece of wood. Same sh*t, different toilet paper!

The WLBT article doesn’t say “at the fair,” it says “at the fairGROUNDS.” The Fairgrounds Complex is a permanent facility that comprises livestock barns, a judging arena, and several multi-purpose buildings including the Mississippi Coliseum and the Trade Mart.

We have events somewhere on the Fairgrounds nearly every day. The Mississippi State Fair is held there annually, in early October. Not July–too hot and humid here in the summer for such things.